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But can't something like GPT help here? For example you show it a picture of a cat, then you say "this is a cat; cats are furry creatures with claws, etc." and then you show it another image and ask if it is also a cat.

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You are humanizing token prediction. The multimodal models for text-vision were all established using a scaffold of architectures that unified text-token and vision-token similarity e.g. BLIP2. [1] It's possible that a model using unified representations might be able to establish that the set of visual tokens you are searching for corresponds to some set of text tokens, but only if the pretrained weights for the vision encoder are able to extract the features corresponding to the object to which you are describing to the vision model.

And the pretrained vision encoder will have at some point been trained to minimize text-visual token cosine similarity on some training set, so it really depends on what exactly that training set had in it.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.12597.pdf

This paper https://cv.cs.columbia.edu/sachit/classviadescr/ (from the same lab as the main post, funnily) does something along those lines with GPT. It shows for things that are easy to describe like Wordle ("tiled letters, some are yellow and green") you can recognize them with zero training. For things that are harder to describe we'll probably need new approaches, but it's an interesting direction.

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